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How to Customize the ‘Via’ status on your Facebook Posts

Did you notice when some people or pages leave a status on Facebook, they would have their own custom ‘posted via..’ printed together at the bottom of the status. This custom status usually will show where the status was posted from and seems to be fixed according to the device they log the status in.

For example, post an FB status from your iPhone, Blackberry or even from your mobile web browser, and you will see the device name reflected at your status like ‘posted via iPhone’ and so on. Let’s take this up a notch and get our statuses posted ‘via le post office’ or ‘via a watch’, shall we? All it takes is a little trick.

Create Facebook Application

The first action is you need to create a new Facebook application. Don’t worry, the Facebook ‘application’ here doesn’t mean anything difficult, rather they are steps to creating your own application ID that will reflect in your ‘posted via..’ status.

Insert App Name and click Continue. You can leave the ‘App Namespace’ and ‘Web Hosting’ as we don’t need them here. The App Name is the name that will appear in your ‘posted via…’ status, so choose wisely.

Complete the security check box and click Submit.

Now in the next page, you will see more details to fill up. Since we are going to do something simple, you don’t have to customize much, just the edit icon and the image to have a more personalized custom status. Add your App Domain and enter your Site URL. Then click Save Changes.

Ok now down to the important step, that is to copy the ‘App ID’. In this tutorial, my App ID is 432823820080744.

Posting a custom status to facebook

You have now created your own Facebook App! Now let’s move on to posting with your new via status.

To share the post to your own Facebook Wall, you can simply copy the URM below, replace the ‘<APP_ID>’ with your own App ID that you have just created and open it in a new browser/tab.

Be sure to change the domain included in the last part of the URL to your own domain as stated in the Facebook Application form. In this case, I am using http://www.hongkiat.com/.

When you open it in a new tab/browser, you will see a custom dialog box with your custom ‘posted via’ stated. Enter your message and click Share. Notice that in this example ‘via Hongkiat.com’ appears at the bottom of the status box.

After you share it on your wall, your friends will see as below, and when they click on the ‘posted via..’ link, it will bring them to the URL you specified in the Facebook Application page earlier. In this example, it will redirect to Hongkiat.com.

Notice the Hongkiat.com logo icon had appeared below the status together with ‘via Hongkiat.com’ link. Now you can place the URL link provided above in your Facebook or even on your website or blog so your friends or fans can use it too.

Conclusion

It is not so hard to create a custom status, and you can even share the URL with your friends and fans on Facebook, website or even on your own blog. The more people using and liking it, the better as you will be getting free directed traffic from your via status. And if you are creative enough, you can even create a web app for this.